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May 24, 2005
The Education of Shelby Knox is a coming of age story about a teenage girl who joins a campaign for comprehensive sex education in the high schools of Lubbock, Texas, an area that boasts some of the nation’s highest teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates in the country.
As Shelby is swept into the fight, she begins to question her deeply conservative Southern Baptist upbringing. When the campaign broadens to include a fight for a gay-straight alliance, Shelby confronts her family and her pastor, in the end declaring herself a feminist and a liberal Christian.
Video & Resources
• Complete Event: Video
• Transcript: Full text (PDF)
• Reel Progress: Web site
Note: All video provided in Windows Media format.
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| Panelists |
 Marion Lipschutz began her career teaching video production in New York City schools and working on projects about early American cinema, Marion Lipschutz started producing and directing with the award-winning Hard Choices, about a “rustbelt” steel town devastated by the closing of its local mill. After associate producing and researching a series on the history of entrepreneurship and a special on AIDS, she worked for HBO on several America Undercover shows and the Real Sex series. She lives on a farm outside of New York City with her husband, two kids, a dog, two cats and two donkeys. |
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 Rose Rosenblatt trained as a writer and editor, beginning with the Emmy award-winning series Lifeline, which aired on NBC. She wrote several National Endowment for the Humanities scripts, including The Two Worlds of Angelita, a dramatic film that showed at the Carnegie Hall Cinema in 1987. She edited Mandela in America (1990) and then launched her producing/directing career with Rights and Wrongs (PBS), a series chronicling human rights abuses around the world. In 1991, while editing The Human Language, a series on linguistics for PBS, she met and partnered with Marion Lipschutz. Rose lives with her husband in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, in a loft that she did not, unfortunately, buy in 1980. Her daughter is a sophomore at Bowdoin College in Maine. |
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 Shelby Knox was the Mayor of the Lubbock Youth Commission while she was in high school and worked for comprehensive sex education in her school. She is currently a sophomore at the University of Texas, majoring in political science and minoring in communications. She writes for a collegiate feminist magazine called The F-Word and is a contributor to Sex, ETC, an online publication of Rutgers University. Shelby is active in both the University Democrats and Voices for Choice chapters on her campus. She recently testified before the Texas State Board of Education in an effort to convince them to adopt more comprehensive texts to be used in health classes. She is currently traveling around the nation to try to raise awareness about the lack of comprehensive sex education in schools, using the film that carries her name as a vehicle for discussion. |
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About Reel Progress:
Reel Progress is a new progressive film series sponsored by the Center for American Progress. Each month, the Center hosts free screenings of progressive films, which are followed by provocative panel discussions with leading public policy experts and filmmakers.
Back to the Reel Progress homepage
Additional Reel Progress films:
• Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World – January 8, 2006
• Sometimes in April – September 21, 2005
• Good Night, and Good Luck – September 20, 2005
• The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till – June 28, 2005
• The Education of Shelby Knox – May 24, 2005
• CRASH – April 18, 2005
• This Divided State — March 23, 2005
• WMD — March 2, 2005
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